PTF Impacts

Alongside Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu, PTF Krishna Kumar received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for personalized tutors in their introduction to programming course. They have since built a personalized tutor for this course, which is available for students privately. They are now in the process of making the tutor public through the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic. 

Former PTF chair Stephanie Holmsten published this article in the Journal of Political Science Education in September 2023, which is partially informed by findings and experiences from her PTF initiative.

Find the complete article here, or read a summary below.

Dr. Acosta, Dr. Castleberry, and colleagues presented a poster at the July 2023 Meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Aurora, Colorado. Their poster discussed the relationships between a student’s perceived preparedness before and after Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), OSCE grades, perception of their performance, pre-pharmacy and pharmacy GPAs, composite Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT) score, and admission Multiple Mini Interview (MMI) scores.

Dr. Jason Heppler of George Mason University reviewed ClioVis, the digital timeline visualization tool developed by Erika Bsumek, in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of American History. According to an excerpt from the review:

PTF Julia Mickenberg worked with her Graduate Assistant and collaborator, Ricky Shear (Department of English), on a survey of UT liberal arts alumni aiming to find out what alumni valued about their liberal arts degrees and how they felt those degrees limited them. The College of Liberal Arts provided Mickenberg with additional funding in order to broaden the scope of the survey from department-specific alumni to the entire College.

PTF Vernita Gordon was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant on April 1, 2022 as principal investigator. The research objective of the grant is to develop a predictive framework for understanding how bacteria use proteins in their cell envelopes to sense and respond to the mechanics of the surface to which they attach.

The Kendra Scott Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute (KS WELI) held the inaugural Female Founder Pitch Competition in October 2021.

PTF Fernanda Leite co-authored this article in the Journal of Architectural Engineering. The article examines the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM) into an undergraduate Architectural Engineering course, which was a core component of Leite's PTF Initiative.

Read the complete paper here, or find the abstract below.

PTF Fernanda Leite authored the academic text BIM for Design Coordination: A Virtual Design and Construction Guide for Designers, General Contractors, and MEP Subcontractors. Leite's book includes a chapter specifically about teaching Building Information Modeling (BIM) in college courses titled "BIM Teaching Considerations," which is directly related to the work done in her PTF Initiative.

View the chapter here, or read the summary below.